The origins of today's computing power can be traced to World War II. To begin then, we must recap the events that led up to that fateful day in November 1972.
It wasn't even the first video game based on "pinging" a ball back and forth across a screen, not by a long shot. Bushnell and Alcorn, much like Jobs and Wozniak (the two Steves who founded Apple), are cultural heroes who are too often portrayed as mad scientist-types, geniuses who woke up one morning, shouted "Eureka!" and went about creating the world's first video games and personal computers, respectively.Īs we've seen already, however, Pong was not even the first coin-operated video game, much less the first video game. The story of Pong has been told many times, and of course it makes for a more compelling story if the game's precursors aren't mentioned. Three decades and hundreds of thousands of video games later, we can only imagine what it must have been like to be a patron in Andy Capp's Tavern that night, marveling at the modest machine that Alcorn had built with a few cheap parts and a $75 black-and-white television from a Walgreens drug store. Now they were asked to perform themselves, to become part of the action on the screen. For too long people had been asked to watch passively as others performed for them. Here was the dawn of a new form of entertainment, a medium that asked for more than eyeballs and silence. Although the patrons that night were undoubtedly enthusiastic, we can only wonder if any were aware that history was being made. "Īs curious patrons gathered around the machine, others plunked quarters into its slot. The game was Pong, a machine recently constructed by Al Alcorn, an engineer working for gaming entrepreneurs Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who had recently incorporated under the name "Atari. The modern video game industry was born on November 29, 1972, in Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California.
#Pong old school tv#
It was the TV game of the future - a future they were now part of.Ī classic image of Pong as displayed by the Coleco Telstar Alpha home system. What Pong really achieved, then, was demonstrating to the masses that computers were far more than esoteric tools for engineers and rocket scientists. In 1972, most Americans were just getting used to color television the idea of playing an actual game on a TV screen was revolutionary.
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